


Look How They Shine For You

by WetSammyWinchester



Series: Secret Rooms in the Bunker [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Domestic Winchesters, Fluff, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-22 21:36:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8302015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WetSammyWinchester/pseuds/WetSammyWinchester
Summary: The Bunker's been their home for years but it still has its secrets. Sam and Dean discover them one by one, starting with that telescope.





	

It started shortly after they moved in. Dean would find Sam standing at the end of the library staring. Sometimes a cup of coffee in his hand, sometimes his arms would be crossed, but always with that crease in his forehead indicating that way too much thought was going on. He had lived with his brother’s intense introspection for years and normally didn’t give it a second thought.

“You okay there, Sammy?” Dean padded out of the bedroom in his slippers and robe, and came to a stop next to Sam’s shoulder, where he followed his brother’s gaze to the end of the library and the giant telescope there.

Between hunts and big bads, there hadn’t been any reason to use the thing. Now as he stood next to Sam, he realized how big and sophisticated the instrument was.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Sam continued to stare at the telescope, where it stood half in shadows, and opened his mouth as if to say something before closing it again.

Dean tightened the sash on his grey bathrobe. “C’mon, spit it out, dude. Breakfast isn’t gonna make itself.”

“Just wondering,” Sam hummed, before looking back at Dean, “how do you look at the stars from the basement?”

Dean started to offer a smart-ass comment back, but then turned back to the telescope. Sam was right - they were below ground on this level. He stepped forward and tilted his head to look up at the ceiling of the niche which appeared to be a segregated brass rotunda - but leading up to where? The floor below the enormous device was a hard concrete slab, probably reinforced for its weight.

“No clue,” Dean offered helpfully as he turned around. “And you’re not figuring it out right this minute. More important question - pancakes or waffles?”

Sam gave a fond smile and shook his head, following Dean out of the library.

Every Saturday night that they weren’t hunting, Sam could be found inside of the niche, puzzling out a telescope that didn’t look at the sky.

Dean preferred to spend his spare time in the garage, looking after Baby or tinkering with the antique cars left behind by the Men of Letters. The cars didn’t get much of a workout on the road - they were a little too high profile and high maintenance -but they were a lot of fun to play around with.

Dean’s head was under the hood of the mint-green ‘57 Ford Thunderbird when he heard a screeching noise as if someone was opening the gates of hell with a rusty can opener. He was two steps towards the door when a metallic thunk sent a tremble through the floor and launched him into a sprint.

“SAM!”

The slick floors leading to the library sent him skidding into his little brother in its doorway.

“Dean, I figured it out!”

Sam’s smile notched his urgency down into more of a pissed-off annoyance but he didn’t get a chance to express that before Sam yanked him towards the niche at the end of the room.

“It took me a while to translate the spell to open it - it was a weird combination of Enochian and Sanskrit-”

“I don’t need to read the novel, Sam - just give me the good stuff.” And that’s when Dean saw it. The brass rotunda above the telescope had opened, unscrewing like a giant puzzle box, leaving a dark hole above the niche. “Holy shit. This is like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except without a giant boulder chasing us.”

“If you liked that, wait til you see this.” Sam stepped up on the platform and examined a switchbox higher up on the wall that was exposed by the open dome. “You’re going to want to hold onto the telescope. I think. For safety.”

There was a short jerk as Sam threw the switch, and Dean clutched a bar on the side of the telescope, as the platform began a slow grinding ascent. “What the hell?”

Dean looked up the dark shaft above them, but he couldn’t see anything. There was a moment of panic, an image of them squished at the top like something from a Mission Impossible movie, before two metals flaps flipped open to reveal a beautiful night sky, with the city lights muted far off to the east.

He whistled at the sight. “Wow. I never knew this was up here.”

His little brother’s face lit up in a way that Dean secretly loved, like when Sam stumbled across some archaic piece of lore or came up with a plan on a hunt. “So, I haven’t figured out exactly how the dome works yet. I think it’s supposed to close up around the telescope once we’re up on the roof to block out all the other light and focus your-”

“Again, I don’t need the schematics - can we just look at the stars or what?”

Sam moved around the telescope to join Dean, rotating the angle and looking in the eyepiece. He made a minute adjustment to the lens, before stepping back. “The Pleiades.”

Dean stepped in and with one hand on the cold metal of the instrument’s barrel, he leaned down to look. What was just a fuzzy cluster of stars to the naked eye before came into sharp focus. The blue-white of several large stars jumped out against the black of the night sky, with hundreds of smaller stars forming a pattern around them. “The Pleiades, huh?”

“Yeah, the Seven Sisters. The daughters of Atlas and companions to Artemis.”

The mention of the pagan goddess made Dean straighten up, recalling how they fought with her three years ago and she disappeared without a trace. He was about to crack a joke about loose ends when he saw Sam’s face looking up at the sky.

The wistful look reminded him of all those times traveling from place to place when they would take a break and look up at the stars from the roof of the Impala. Nowhere to go especially, the night stretching out comfortably in front of them. While Dean would kick back, enjoying a quiet moment with his best car, his favorite person and a cold beer from the green cooler, Sam’s face would scrunch up and there was an intensity to his search of the sky. Dean would spend as much time looking at Sam’s face as he would at the stars, wondering what was going on behind those hazel eyes.

As he bent down to look in the lens again, he changed the angle and something familiar caught his eye. “Well, look at that. Come here, Sam, take a look.”

Sam bent down and looked. “Orion? The Hunter. You know, the story is that he is always chasing after the Pleiades. _When the Pleiades flee mighty Orion and plunge into the misty deep and all the gusty winds are raging._ It’s not a happy story.”

“None of those old Greek myths were.” Dean tapped his brother on the shoulder. “Well, if Orion was as good a hunter as we are, he would have caught them.”

Sam looked up and cracked that familiar smile that was only for Dean, the one that said my brother is an idiot.

“How about you and I look at this dome in the morning and figure out how to get it to work? Then we’ll come back with a six pack of beer and a coupla folding chairs tomorrow and make a night of it.” Dean moved close enough to Sam to see the starlight reflected back in his dark eyes, as he removed his brother’s long fingers from the eyepiece.

Sam smiled back, the crease between his eyes smoothed away for the moment. “Yeah, I’d like that.”


End file.
